For Solution Alliances

No man is an island. The same can be said for technology vendors.

Multi-vendor solutions have become a necessity for meeting customer demands and creating continued growth for technology vendors. Solution Alliances continue to grow …yet, for channel partners this isn’t necessarily resolving their needs for making it easy to do business. Even in the best of circumstances, managing for sustainable profitability, enabling their teams and penetrating new markets is challenging for channel partners.

For Alliance managers, this creates challenges that require both executive-level and operational commitment. Governance and funding are as foundational to successful alliances as are product roadmaps and technical integrations. Visibility and demonstrated measurable influence are needed internally as well as externally.

Accelerating Alliances through channels is a multi-stage journey that requires adequate funding and clear governance to ensure ongoing commitment and collaboration. A channel-led route-to-market, however, is not wholly different than bringing a single Vendor’s solution to market. The Sellers Journey remains the same.

Achieving measurable route-to-market success for each of the Alliance partners requires field commitment, targeted partner enablement efforts and adapting state-of-the-art Through-Partner Marketing Automation tools to enable partners to more easily generate demand for unique multi-vendor solutions. Coupling partner-generated demand with opportunity (deal) registration provides visibility to the partners’ pipeline. Rewarding partner sellers for their efforts is critical; creating new programs is often a non-starter as such tactical efforts is rarely a priority and may even appear misaligned with other channel strategies of an solution alliance partner.

Creating processes and implementing tools that are agile and effective for Alliance members while keeping it easy for Partners can be challenging. We can help.